Apr 12, 2010

News on a cellular level

My father, a first-generation American, shared this observation when he returned from a trip to the motherland a few years ago:

Even in the most isolated rural villages, where modern plumbing doesn’t exist and electricity is unreliable, everyone owns a cell phone. Gone are the days when Ma Farmer clangs a pot with a wooden spoon to draw Pa Farmer in from the fields for supper. Now it’s just a matter of flipping open a phone and dialing his digits.

The cell phone and other mobile devices have also affected American life beyond the traditional 3:30 p.m. call to ask the spouse what’s for dinner. According to the Pew people pollsters, these devices are erasing the digital divide between white Americans and their black and Hispanic counterparts. Check out these numbers:

  • On a typical day, 59 percent of whites hit the web through a hardwired computer. Only 45 percent of blacks do the same.
  • However, blacks and Hispanics hit the web through their mobile devices about 42 percent more often than whites, despite equal ownership of such devices.
  • Altogether, blacks and whites did the same number of activities online, regardless of how they accessed the net.

This leads me to ask: If a hyperlocal news outlet delivers content — including pretty pictures, big graphics, and Flash video — strictly through mobile-unfriendly websites, then who’s actually receiving the news? If the hyperlocal beat consists mostly of people who can access the web by a desktop or laptop computer (regardless of race), then web design doesn’t matter.

But for those outlets operating in communities where residents tend to access the web on mobile devices (particularly cell phones without full HTML browsers), then it may be time to consider a phone-friendly layout that can be delivered without the benefit of an app. That means fewer photos, zero multimedia, strictly text content. It also means tighter, more concise writing, shorter leads, and perhaps use of the standard “inverted pyramid” format instead of a conversational, bloggy style of writing.

I haven’t done research into how a hyperlocalist would create a phone-friendly layout, but it seems any common web-publishing tool will do as long as the content’s structure and layout are simple enough for a phone to digest. (This does NOT include Google’s Blogger, which tends to have painfully slow download times on mobile devices.)

I’ll touch on news distribution via text message tomorrow.

Photo courtesy of Flickr user kristi-san.

Apr 5, 2010

Back on the grid

It only took ten days to move into my new hyperlocal digs, but alas, it’s done. For nearly two weeks, I lived on pizza and cheese sandwiches, burst digital bubbles on my signal-less cell phone, and wrestled an aerial antenna for a better reception of “Jerry Springer.”

For hard-core techies, that scene signals the end of civilization. But my temporary disconnect from online reality gave me a greater appreciation for real reality, the one that exists (and it does) beyond the internet.

It also allowed me to consider how hyperlocalists can better serve the underserved — and by underserved, I’m not just talking about plugged-in communities without a local newspaper or news website. I’m talking about communities that don’t even appear on the grid: lower-income neighborhoods without broadband, communities in which English is not the primary language, even sparsely populated rural communities.

The net might not penetrate those areas, but hyperlocalists can still serve them using different, even “primitive” technologies. Expect the next few blog posts to look into this idea.

Photo courtesy of Flickr user Spikenzie.

Feb 17, 2010

On being and nothingness in journalism

Yesterday, I had two terrific conversations on what it means to be a reporter. The first happened on this blog with Rockville (Md.) Central’s Cynthia Cotte Griffiths, who pointed out that community bloggers and journalists serve similar but not identical rolls in the hyperlocal news landscape.

The second transpired on Twitter with Gannett reporter Chris Serico, who shared his thoughts on sportscaster Bob Costas. Serico finds Costas to be a “smart and self-effacing” announcer, whereas I believe Costas is a babbling egomaniac who’s strayed from his roll as a sports reporter.

Both discussions got me thinking: What is a reporter? Is it someone who abandons the self for the sake of objectivity? Is it someone who incorporates or even projects the self as an act of empathy? Is there a happy medium between mensch and übermensch? What is happiness anyway?

Of course, some of these questions may never be answered or even understood. But I’d like to take a swing at the first one, on being a reporter, with an emphasis on hyperlocalism. Here goes nothing:

According to the Merriam-Webster dictionary, a reporter is someone who works for a newspaper, magazine, or television company to gather, report and broadcast news. Throw in organizations like radio companies, press agencies and websites, and I’m cool with Merriam-Webster. But the dictionary (and I) distinguish reporters from journalists, those whose writing is characterized “by a direct presentation of facts or description of events without an attempt at interpretation.”

Can community bloggers be considered reporters? If they offer new information that’s relevant to the community conversation, then yes. They should be extended all the courtesies and credentials available to the mainstream press. But are community bloggers journalists? No, not if they participate in news creation or inject opinion into their content.

(The same can be asked of Bob Costas and other mainstream content producers. Are they reporters, journalists, commentators, columnists, or what?)

The distinction between reporter and journalist does not diminish the former’s importance in delivering vital information to the community. However, editorializing can be a dangerous thing for both, especially on the hyperlocal level. On the business end, it can alienate potential advertisers and sponsors. But even worse, it can lead news consumers to question motives.

There are some damn good community blogs out there digging up dirt that mainstream media won’t touch, and they’re definitely worth reading. But as far as practice goes, I’ll stick with journalism.

Photo courtesy of Flickr user jef_safi.

Feb 16, 2010

What’s the frequency, Kenneth?

Here’s a nice little victory: Hyperlocal news sites and blogs are stimulating more citizen discussion on local policy issues than mainstream news outlets, according to a publicly funded study conducted in Portland, Oregon. I’m talking on the order of four and a half times more discussion. Booyah!

The marketing group that conducted the study didn’t explain the difference, but Harvard’s Nieman Journalism Lab chalked it up to the ability of topic-specific sites to reach target audiences, versus the watered-down mainstream coverage engineered to speak to the masses.

And there’s this theory from fellow hyperlocalist Cynthia Cotte Griffiths, with Rockville (Md.) Central: “Bloggers are on the front line producing story ideas. We’re free to interact,” she said via Twitter. “Reporters are often restricted.”

Um, no and yes. While bloggers and hyperlocalists are “on the front line,” so are mainstream reporters. Newspapers still break most stories, which bloggers then regurgitate, a Pew study found (in Baltimore, anyway). In that sense, reporters not only occupy the front line, they bring the beer and chips. Bloggers (83 percent of them, according to Pew) just nibble on the crumbs.

I agree that reporters are “restricted” somewhat when it comes to their level of interaction with readers. Good practice requires them to stay out of the fray, to maintain objectivity. But that shouldn’t prevent journalists from eliciting conversation from readers, from “interviewing” them and moderating discussion strings in online comments sections.

Perhaps the bigger problem lies with the institutions that manage mainstream media and the agendas they put forth. Some of the country’s best known publications — The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and Harper’s Magazine, to name a few — are managed by billionaires who jump into the news business primarily because it gives them access to the powers that be, Advertising Age’s Simon Dumenco posted last week.

“Much has been written about the death of journalism, blah blah, as the margins at once-great publishing companies vanish. But something else is vanishing too: the old black magic that drew deep-pocketed backers to media ownership because media (specifically newspapers and magazines) offered them ample other rewards (regardless of the state of the balance sheet). Like, prestige. A place at the table. Access to the halls of power.”

That’s not journalism for the sake of civic discourse, quality reporting or even business. That’s just journalism for the sake of ego. And if a news outlet operates only to stroke the egos of aloof billionaire backers, then there’s no room left for average news consumers to share their thoughts.

Mainstream media insists on talking to people. Hyperlocalists understand that it’s about talking with people. Until traditional media changes its mind frame, it will continue to circle the drain. No new technology or novel distribution system will reverse that trend.

Photo courtesy of Flickr user bbaltimore.

Feb 15, 2010

There’s graphic, and then there’s gratuitous.

There are times when video news footage is best left in the delete folder. For NBC Sports, that time was last Saturday morning, when they first aired footage of the accident that killed Georgian luger Nodar Kumaritashvili at the Olympic games in Vancouver.

My objection to the video’s airing is twofold. First, it was too graphic for my taste, but that’s my hangup. More germane to this blog, the video added nothing of value to the news story.

Media outlets had already reported Friday that Kumaritashvili lost control of his sled during a practice run, flew over a track wall at about 90 miles per hour and then slammed against a metal beam. Some outlets, like The New York Times, also ran still photos of Kumaritashvili airborne before the final impact, with his sled still on the track.

Between the textual description of the accident and the still photography, it was easy to piece together a complete story of how the 21-year-old athlete lost his life. Very much like a motorcycle accident, he was thrown from his vehicle at high speed and ultimately crashed into a hard object. The (tragic) end.

And NBC’s video footage of the accident showed just that — stuff that was already known to those following the story, and nothing that wasn’t described in sportscaster Bob Costas’s preface. It offered no new details or insight on how or why the accident happened. It was gratuitous.

The knocks that NBC took for the video should serve as a lesson to multimedia journalists. Puffing up a news piece with extraneous content has the potential to devalue one’s credibility with news consumers. It shows laziness on the journalist’s part for posting graphic detail without considering its informative value or its usefulness to the overall civic conversation. To some extent, it also insults the consumer’s intelligence, as if bloated content would so easily impress.

Going graphic is especially risky for hyperlocalists, whose consumers tend to take greater ownership in the content. I’ve had to defend my use of certain language and photographs when readers found them too disturbing or offensive, though in my editorial judgment, they were proper vehicles for delivering information and were not gratuitous. Someone’s always going to take offense at something.

Ultimately, the hyperlocalist must decide whether pissing people off does good for the community conversation. If going graphic means doing good, just be prepared to roll with the punches.

Photo of the Olympic cauldron in Vancouver courtesy of Flickr user Marcin Chady.

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